A Mac User’s Journey into Powerpoint
This is my tale of converting from Mac Keynote to Windows 10 PowerPoint. I’ll admit upfront that I’ve been an abashedly huge fan of Keynote. I speak professionally and take great pride in my slides and have used nearly every corner of Keynote to create animated and engaging slides.
I became disillusioned with Apple last fall with their new MacBook Bros™ and I switched to Windows 10. However, not many people remember in the fall of 2013 there was another huge moment of Apple disillusionment, the release of Keynote 6. It caused howls of frustration from professional Keynote users. Some of the issues were slowly fixed over time (presentation view was the big one) but after that fiasco, Keynote just stopped changing. At this point it feels much like a fly in amber, not improving in any meaningful way. It’s been hard watching Apple pour all of it’s energy into porting a subset of Keynote to iPad as well as working on an even worse web version. Keynote used to be THE BOMB, it could do things that would amaze my colleagues but now, like much like the Mac line, it’s just coasting on it’s past greatness, a product barely on life support.
So I jumped into PowerPoint with high hopes, eager to learn a new creative tool. But my expectations were sober and measured: two things were properly understood:
- Give it time!
It would take awhile to learn a new system so I shouldn’t be grumpy about new UX flows just because they were different than the Mac. - I’m Weird!
I never use templates for slides, nearly always construct my slides as a collections of animated objects. This is not what normal people do. I wasn’t expecting PowerPoint to meet my needs right out of the box.
I spent a few weeks just poking around, converting old Keynote slides over and giving them ‘as is’. The point was to start slow. This last week, I built my first new deck from scratch and really tried to make things work for me. It was a mixed bag.
The Pros
- Morph Slide Animation
Keynote’s MagicMove is the primary workhorse animation. It can do so many amazing things. Morph is the PowerPoint equivalent. It actually works quite well. There are however bugs with it: it gets confused animating many similar bitmaps. - Drag markers
Dragging objects around, much like Keynote, highlights alignment markers. It’s well done and effective. - Transition/animation fairly good
The overall model of transitions (for slides) and Animations (for Objects) is fairly good. The majority of the primary use cases takes place in the Ribbon (more on that later) which is nice. - “Emphasis” animations are interesting
Something Keynote doesn’t have! You can add emphasis animations to objects (such as pulse) Some Keynote animations have a ‘bounce’ effect at the end but this approach is much more flexible and allows you to add any emphasis to any transition. - Smart Duplicate
I love this. It reminds me of OmniGraffle and definitely NOT in Keynote. If you duplicate and move an object, subsequent duplicates remember the offset. Very handy for creating a block of similarly spaced items.
The Cons
- Drag select must encompass entire object
This sounds trivial but bear with me. With Keynote, when you drag select, anything your selection rectangle intersects becomes selected. With PowerPoint, your section must encompass the entire object. I can see how this makes sense for small objects but for larger blocks of text, which have no visible edge, it’s maddening. It’s as if you can’t select objects. This is one of those small things that gets you EVERY SINGLE TIME you use it. And no, I won’t ‘just get used to it’. - Shift arrow grows objects
I just don’t get this one AT ALL. Nearly every graphic product on the planet uses the arrow keys to move 1 pixel and the shift modifier to move many. With PowerPoint it changes the width. So strange. It makes moving and arranging objects much harder. I’m sure there is an army of people used to this by now so making this consistent with ‘creative apps’ is likely never going to happen. But as a creative professional, this is one of those tiny details that screams that this product isn’t for me. - The Ribbon is only skin deep
As a UX concept, the Ribbon is actually fairly interesting and when done well it brings a context sensitivity to an experience. When you select an object, the right part of the ribbon highlights. It’s subtle and took me a while to ‘get it’ but once I did, it’s helpful, drawing me into the right Ribbon to edit my object. This isn’t the case with PowerPoint. Take a look at the screen shot below. Yellow is Ribbon, green is a panel and blue is a modal dialog box. All three are showing the duration of the current animation. It appears that PowerPoint used to bury everything you needed deep into modal dialog boxes. They first tried to fix it with panels then later with the Ribbon. The problem is that both of these attempts were just window dressing, they didn’t solve the underlying structural problem. (and don’t get me started about ‘right click’)
- Image transparency
It’s a frequent issue for me to drop an image into keynote as a JPG and need to knock out the background. This is very easy as Keynote has optimized for this task. In PowerPoint, you can do this as well, but the tool is overly designed and far too complex. Nearly every time I use it, it mangles the image. I’m slowly getting my head wrapped around how to use it but like so much bad UX, it’s my responsibility to fix the problem.
- Can’t drag text objects
For some reason, PowerPoint thinks that dragging a text object should be really really hard to do. It seems to come from the fact that they want clicks to fall through a transparent object. Here, take a look:
- Voice over is nearly impossible
Now, I’ll admit that this one is VERY specific. I use Keynote to create simple walk throughs of a concept and then record my voice over the top and send out a quick 2–3 minute video. It’s a great way to get a point across without a long email. I’ve even done it here on medium. This is nearly impossible with PowerPoint. As each slide has it’s own audio, it means your voice can’t cross slide transitions. I was forced to buy Camtasia so I could hack around the problem by doing a screen cast but even that was a hack as I couldn’t record with my speakers notes! I was forced to find a second monitor to do that.
Conclusion
There are actually more UX issues I found with PowerPoint but I felt the above list captured the key problems I’m facing. Besides, detailed UX bugs get boring after awhile…
Powerpoint is a very powerful product that can do nearly everything I could do in Keynote. I can make it work, but with significant frustrations. There are a range of UX issues that make it a frustrating product to use. If Microsoft truly wants to appeal to creative professionals like me, they need to do more than just make Windows 10 touch friendly (which is a very nice start btw) My worry is that PowerPoint is just a cranky cousin of Photoshop, too big to change and too entrenched in it’s ways to ever really significantly improve.
